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Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

China cannot buy ASML machines. All advanced semiconductor manufacturing in China is done with stockpiled ASML machines from before the ban.

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That restriction is only for the most advanced systems. According to ASML's Q3 2025 filing, 42% of all system sales went to China.

SK Hynix also has significant memory manufacturing presence in China; or about 40% of the company's entire DRAM capacity.

Would you really need ASML machines to do DDR5 RAM? Honest question, but I figured there was competition for the non-bleeding edge - perhaps naively so.

Yes. You need 16nm or better for DDR5.

ASML cannot be avoided for 7nm and better due to EUV.

As someone who knows next to nothing about this space, why can China not build their own machines? Is ASML the only company making those machines? If so, why? Is it a matter of patents, or is the knowledge required for this so specialized only they've built it up?

Yes. ASML is the only company making these machines. And both, they own thousands of patents and are also the only ones with the institutional knowledge required to build them anyway.

I thought Fermi paradox is about nukes; I increasingly think it's about chips

They can - if they are willing to invest a a lot of money over several years. The US got Nuclear bombs in a few years during WWII with this thinking, and China (or anyone else) could too. This problem might be harder than a bomb, but the point remains, all it takes is a willingness to invest.

Of course the problem is we don't see what would be missed by doing this investment. If you put extra people into solving this problem that means less people curing cancer or whatever. (China has a lot of people, but not unlimited)

Designing such an advanced lithography machine is probably a Manhattan Project scale task. China is indeed trying to make progress and they will probably get there someday but for now ASML is the only company in the world that knows how to build these or anything remotely close.

ASML is not the only sole supplier involved. There's a few more layers of them you have to replace.

Right, the most famous example is Zeiss which is the only company in the world that builds the high-precision mirrors needed for the most advanced ASML machines. I’m not sure if those are subject to export bans too, but even if they are, I think China could eventually figure out how to build them. It’s just a matter of a huge amount of R&D that would need to be done first.

If you want EUV (lowest nm), you'll need ASML, and they won't sell it to random strangers. EUV isn't exported to China. Only the end product is.

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